For weeks, Wade Phillips’s perplexed countenance seemed to sum up the Dallas Cowboys’ season gone awry: nobody could quite figure out how things had gone so wrong for a team that began the season talking about hosting a Super Bowl in its home stadium, and nobody — especially Phillips, it seemed — knew how to stop the Cowboys’ slide from America’s Team to N.F.L.’s doormat.

On Monday, the Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, who despite a reputation for impetuous football decisions had never fired a coach in midseason, brought Phillips’s tenure to a conclusion. Just days after saying Phillips would remain as the head coach throughout the season, Jones fired Phillips in a meeting hours after the Cowboys were humiliated by the Green Bay Packers on national television, 45-7, to fall to 1-7. He will be replaced for the rest of the season by the team’s offensive coordinator, Jason Garrett.

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Phillips’s ouster ended the N.F.L.’s long and often excruciating coaching watch. Phillips, who is soft-spoken and relaxed by coaching standards and well liked by players, had looked beleaguered intermittently during his three-plus years as the head coach. His laid-back style worked well in the beginning because it was a contrast from Bill Parcells’s more gruff demeanor, but eventually Phillips’s inability — or disinclination — to keep his players in check cost him his job.